


but diamonds are only carbon

by postcardmystery



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, captain america: the winter soldier - Fandom
Genre: Dehumanization, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-09
Updated: 2014-04-09
Packaged: 2018-01-18 17:16:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1436425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/postcardmystery/pseuds/postcardmystery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The blond man’s smile slips between his ribs like a knife. He does not say <i>wake up</i>. Time is not fluid here, merely eternal, a serpent swallowing its own tail.</p><p>His left ring finger twitches. He does not remember, but he does not forget.</p>
            </blockquote>





	but diamonds are only carbon

**Author's Note:**

> I think a general trigger warning for dehumanization should cover everything.

His ring finger, his left ring finger, is twitching, and it shouldn’t be. Something in him is eroding, his arm not obeying him, his thoughts full of-- something. _Something._ He is a rock being beaten by waves on a distant shore; shrapnel from a space station burning up on impact with the earth’s atmosphere. The languages his tongue obeys, rather than speaks, are fading. His shoulder is on fire. Something is very wrong. He doesn’t remember what he’s forgotten. He’s remembering things he doesn’t remember at all. 

The blond man’s smile slips between his ribs like a knife. He does not say _wake up_. Time is not fluid here, merely eternal, a serpent swallowing its own tail.

His left ring finger twitches. He does not remember, but he does not forget.

 

 

 

His skin is filthy, old dirt ground down over even older dirt, his nails thick and gritty with stinking grime when he slips a blade beneath them. His hair is matted at the scalp, hacked at the ends and some of the roots, and comes out in clumps in the shower, like a dying dog. He finds he does not remember hunger, but identifies it absently, like a painting he’s never seen before but by an artist he knows, the edges smudged but possible to identify. He does not know why he thinks of an artist first. He doesn’t remember what he remembers. He does not know what remains in him to forget.

He hoards every moment jealously, replays every small interaction in his head-- and they _are_ small, stepping away from a man on the sidewalk, keeping his back flat against the wall of an elevator, avoiding the brush of skin or eyes on him. Small. But sometimes people look at him, anyway. They look at him. He’s real. He’s _here_. He writes down his dreams and burns the paper before the ink dries. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for. He doesn’t know if he’d even know if he found it.

“That’ll be twenty bucks, son,” says a street vendor, and he wonders, for the first time, if he was ever someone’s son. If he has a mother out there, missing him, a sister, a wife, Christ, a dog. He looks inside himself inside an empty box marked _family_ inside a bigger box he doesn’t want to open, and it’s still empty. Maybe no one misses him, but that doesn’t mean no one’s looking for him.

He wonders what will happen when he catches up. 

 

 

 

“Who the hell is Bucky,” he says, and breaks his own programming without even realising. 

“But I knew him,” he says, and red numbers flash, warning, panicked, in his vision, and a broken toy is a useless toy, but he knew he him, he did, he _did_.

“You’re my mission,” he says--

\--and both redemption and damnation, they start with a fall.

 

 

 

“I don’t know you,” he says to him, in Venice, in Prague, in Minsk.

“If you didn’t know me, you’d kill me,” he says, in return, and it’s the tone of a master calming a dog that he thinks is about to go rabid.

Wait. No. Programming. Lies.

“If I killed you, I wouldn’t know how I know you,” he says instead, and the blond man smiles. 

“If you killed me, I’d let you,” says the blond man, and this hurts, for some reason, but he can’t remember why, or remember why he wants to remember.

“If you let me, I would,” he says, and it’s a lie. 

(He didn’t know he knew how to lie. This is a day of firsts.)

 

 

 

He shaves his head, and hates it, but feels-- something. He does not have words for feelings, does not know which are good and which are bad, can guess, but not know for sure. He nicks the skin above his ear, and learns that he bleeds red, which might explain whether or not he’s human, but then again, might not. The blond man bleeds red, and he doesn’t know if he’s human. All he has left is to guess, where once all he had were orders. It’s a different cage, but still a cage. 

His hair has grown out some by the time he the blond man finds him again. (Let. The missing verb there is ‘let’.) 

“You need to slick it back again,” he says, like that means something.

He reaches up, automatic, to brush his hair back, and, yeah, fine. Maybe it does.

 

 

 

“Come home, Buck,” says the blond man, in London, the sky grey and the church bells tolling.

“And where’s that,” he says, hissing, his lips twisting, like he’s just saying it to fuck with him-- but.

“You know where,” says the blond man, solid, sad, and he doesn’t.

He _doesn’t_. He never will, and this stupid lunk of a brotherbestfriendlover _familyeverythingnothingI’mfollowinghim_ \--

“Nah,” he says, “Brooklyn’s hell on earth in August.”

 

 

 

Bucky, because that’s his name, or the name he wears for Steve Rogers, lets that same Steve Rogers strap them both into a private plane and he goes home, or the closest thing to it.

Steve does not say, _what do you remember_ , nor does he say, _how much do you think you’ve still forgotten?_

He says, “You still hate planes, eh?”

“No shit,” says Bucky, and does not look out of the window, not even once.

 

 

 

“I look fuckin’ awful in that,” says Bucky, because he did. Does. Whatever. He hates the Smithsonian film. It’s naked on his face, and he doesn’t like being naked. In any sense.

“I don’t know,” says Steve, pulling his hood up a little higher, tightening his hand on the shoulder of Bucky’s good (bad) arm, eyes never leaving Bucky's (realtime) face, “I think you look alright.”


End file.
